Monday, June 13, 2016

A Little Good News



A little bit of light on a dark day:
The Surprising Problem With U.S. Manufacturing: It's Creating Too Many Jobs

An ongoing theme of our reports from “career technical” schools—like this high school in Georgia and this community college in Mississippi and these high schools and tech-training centers in California and South Carolina, and these colleges in Vermont and Maine—is that for people with appropriate training, medium-wage skilled jobs actually exist...

Job openings in manufacturing are at a 15-year high. Layoffs are at a long-term low. Wages are rising faster in manufacturing than in the economy as a whole. The unemployment rate in manufacturing is below the overall average. Please go to the item for the full presentation, but here is one of several representative charts, showing continued recovery after the crash of 2008.
...
I will celebrate anything that makes it more possible for Americans to find a decent job at decent wage.

5 comments:

Duncan Watson said...

I followed the link and was unable to find the "problem" mentioned in the headline. Did I miss something or is the "problem" something mentioned in the Bloomberg article I didn't click through for.

Just curiosity from one of your RSS readers. - Duncan

mu said...

Duncan,

I think I may have figured out your issue - only the first part of the article displays on initial page load. If you click "Read On +" at the end of that segment, you see:

"So what’s the problem? According to Sen, the growth in manufacturing employment has slowed because there are not enough people to fill the openings.

That is indeed a problem. But it is a very different kind of problem from what I take to be the general chattering-class view, and overwhelmingly the political view: that not enough Americans have manufacturing jobs, because there just aren’t enough of those jobs.

The economy is indeed finding ways to create demand few new manufacturing jobs, and that demand is pushing wages up. The next step is to prepare more people for them — again, a challenge, but a better kind of challenge than that of flat demand"

That isn't itself super specific, but I'm guessing it answers your question. For whatever reasons, there are a dearth of people qualified in skilled, manufacturing-specific trades.

Potomacker said...

With a huge grain of salt. It sounds like schools of education that always tout the everpresent demand for teachers, somewhere. Hey, the lion taming school insists that there are oodles of jobs for lion tamers.

Unknown said...

This sounds like the culmination of the plan for the after-market vocational training schools that get federal student loans. Promote American manufacturing, create a demand for manufacturing positions, advertise that you can train people to fill those spots, make a fortune from the desperate students, only 10% of which will get a job, and then you can have the corporate overlords transfer all those manufacturing jobs to 3rd world countries to increase profit margins after establishing the market for the manufactured products.

Lather rinse repeat. PROFIT!!

Duncan Watson said...

Thank you, that helped